” People suspicious of coercive power have been on the defensive recently—or, more accurately, their opponents want them to be on the defensive. The latest argument spouted by fans of a government potent enough to give you all you could want and give it to you good and hard is that any eyebrows raised at the prospect of such an expansive state are evidence of racism.

Don’t try to follow the logic; you might trip over the twists and turns it takes.

But here’s the honest truth: Not just skepticism toward state power, but a strong antigovernment sentiment, are natural and logical results of taking a close look at the state and its works—its bloody, heavy-handed works.

Let’s start with a number: 262 million. That’s the number of unarmed people the late Prof. R. J. Rummel estimated governments murdered in mass killings he termed “democide” during the 20th century. “This democide murdered 6 times more people than died in combat in all the foreign and internal wars of the century,” he wrote.

Unsurprisingly, the bloodiest body count was run up by totalitarian regimes, though authoritarians were busy stacking up the corpses, too, if in smaller piles. Democracies were also responsible for unjustifiable deaths, especially in subduing resistance in their colonial possessions (think: Belgian Congo) and in indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets during wars (think: Hiroshima), but to a far lesser degree than Communists, Nazis, and overdecorated generalissimos.

Rummel’s 1997 book, Power Kills, stated his case most strongly, but he nicely summarized the argument on his website:

It is true that democratic freedom is an engine of national and individual wealth and prosperity. Hardly known, however, is that freedom also saves millions of lives from famine, disease, war, collective violence, and democide (genocide and mass murder). That is, the more freedom, the greater the human security and the less the violence. Conversely, the more power governments have, the more human insecurity and violence. In short: to our realization that power impoverishes we must also add that power kills.”

” Salon.com published a truly disgusting article on the supposed myths of communism. There are a lot of problems with it, but I’ll focus on this particularly revolting passage, which might seem literally true if you drop the context of what it suggests:

For one thing, a large number of the people killed under Soviet communism weren’t the kulaks everyone pretends to care about but themselves communists. Stalin, in his paranoid cruelty, not only had Russian revolutionary leaders assassinated and executed, but indeed exterminated entire communist parties. These people weren’t resisting having their property collectivized; they were committed to collectivizing property.

This is misdirection. It’s true that Stalin murdered so many people that in absolute terms “a large number” were communists, but in relative terms, they were a minority of his victims. Of course, Stalin’s murder of communists isn’t any more defensible than any other regime’s murder of communists, and it says something that so many regimes, from Maoist China to Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam, slaughtered communists in sectarian crackdowns on political opponents.”

” Stalin did in fact focus on class enemies—”kulaks,” which basically means relatively wealthy peasants—and later in the 1930s had ethnic Poles and other minorities summarily shot by the hundreds of thousands. The first ethnic-based genocide in mid-20th century Europe was thus inaugurated by the Bolsheviks, not the Nazis.”

Via ReasonTV Comes This Discussion Of Guns And Mental Illness

Published on Nov 19, 2013

” In the wake of any mass shooting, there’s a predictable and justified burst of public outrage and sorrow followed by a series of “do something now” legislative proposals meant to prevent similar tragedies from ever occurring again.

Depending on the political leanings of the politician or media figure offering the solution, the proposal often rests upon one of these twin assumptions: We must rid the world of the wrong kinds of weapons (i.e., “assault weapons”), or, we must keep guns away from the wrong kinds of people (i.e., “crazy people”).

“How many more copycats are waiting in the wings for their moment of fame from a national media machine that rewards them with wall-to-wall attention and a sense of identity that they crave, while provoking others to try to make their mark?” asked Wayne LaPierre, official lightning rod of the National Rifle Association, in the wake of the Sandy Hook elementary shooting. “A dozen more killers, a hundred more? How can we possibly even guess how many, given our nation’s refusal to create an active national database of the mentally ill?”

Even the nation’s premier gun lobby believes keeping guns away from the mentally ill is a good idea. It’s a sensible-sounding proposal, a logical precaution. But some forensic psychiatrists, whose jobs include the task of identifying potentially violent individuals, say that targeting the mentally ill isn’t as simple as it sounds.

Watch the Reason TV video above, “The Truth About Mental Illness and Guns,” to hear more about flawed gun control policies and for the full story behind the Phillips’ gun confiscation experience.

Approximately 7:30 minutes. Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Shot by Tracy Oppenheimer, Will Neff, and Weissmueller.”

” Ayo Kimathi, a small business specialist for the Department of Homeland Security, apparently doesn’t like white people, and according to a report posted Thursday at The Blaze, runs a website calling for the mass murder of whites in his spare time.

“The 21st century will either mark the return of Black resistance to white domination or global white-on-Black genocide leading to our complete extinction,” says Kimathi’s site, “War on the Horizon.” “Warfare is eminent, and in order for Black people to survive the 21st century, we are going to have to kill a lot of whites – more than our christian (sic) hearts can possibly count.”

BizPac Review said that according to a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Hatewatch” blog, the site advocates “the mass murder of whites and the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of ‘black-skinned Uncle Tom race traitors.’” “

” In America, all atrocities are not equal: Minutes after the Senate declined to support so-called gun control in the wake of the Newtown massacre, the president rushed ill-advisedly on air to give a whiny, petulant performance predicated on the proposition that one man’s mass infanticide should call into question the constitutional right to bear arms.

Simultaneously, the media remain terrified that another man’s mass infanticide might lead you gullible rubes to question the constitutional right to abortion, so the ongoing Kermit Gosnell trial in Philadelphia has barely made the papers — even though it involves large numbers of fully delivered babies who were decapitated and had their feet chopped off and kept in pickling jars. Which would normally be enough to guarantee a perpetrator front-page coverage for weeks on end.

“Doctor” Gosnell seems likely to prove America’s all-time champion mass murderer. But his victims are ideologically problematic for the media, and so the poor blood-soaked monster will never get his moment in the spotlight.

The politicization of mass murder found its perfect expression in one of those near parodic pieces to which the more tortured self-loathing dweebs of the fin de civilization west are prone. As the headline in Salon put it, “Let’s Hope The Boston Marathon Bomber Is A White American.” David Sirota is himself a white American, but he finds it less discomforting to his Princess Fluffy Bunny worldview to see his compatriots as knuckle-dragging nutjobs rather than confront all the apparent real-world contradictions of the diversity quilt. He had a lot of support for his general predisposition.”

” Is there a link between the violence in our society and the violence our children see in the entertainment industry, including video games, television, and movies? That’s going to be a tough one to determine under any circumstances. Either way, check out this new report about Newtown shooter Adam Lanza:

In some quarters, Nancy Lanza, 52 at the time of her death, is viewed as a villain, a gun-obsessed mother who allowed her disturbed son access to firearms and let him fester in the basement playing violent video games while she traveled and enjoyed nightlife. […]

During a search of the Lanza home after the deadly school shootings, police found thousands of dollars worth of graphically violent video games.”

Disappointed with New York State lawmakers and other jurisdictions around the country who have passed strict gun control legislation, the companies—composed of firearm manufacturers, gunsmiths, and sporting goods retailers—have announced these policies in the past week.

” Houston said Griego told police that after killing his family at their Albuquerque home on Saturday, he reloaded and planned to go to a nearby Wal-Mart store. “He contemplated ending this with mass destruction,” Houston said.

Instead, the 15-year-old spent time with his girlfriend, and the pair later went to a church where his father once worked as a pastor. A staff member called police, Houston said.

The teenager told police he shot his mother, the first victim in his rampage, because he was “frustrated” with her, Houston said.

Police said that after shooting his brother and two sisters, Griego then waited five hours for his father to return from work and ambushed him …

Police said that after the killings, Griego sent his 12-year-old girlfriend a picture of his mother’s body and the two then spent the day together, possibly planning to kill her parents. Charges may also be brought against the girlfriend, Houston said.”

” No one wants to ever again see anything like the senseless slaughter of 26 people – including 20 children – at a school. But as legislators turn toward creating new gun laws, here are five facts they need to know.

1. Violent crime – including violent crime using guns – has dropped massively over the past 20 years.

The violent crime rate – which includes murder, rape, and beatings – is half of what it was in the early 1990s. And the violent crime rate involving the use of weapons has also declined at a similar pace.

2. Mass shootings have not increased in recent years.

Despite terrifying events like Sandy Hook or last summer’s theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, mass shootings are not becoming more frequent. “There is no pattern, there is no increase,” says criminologist James Allen Fox of Northeastern University, who studies the issue. Other data shows that mass killings peaked in 1929.”

” The reality, as Cpl. Boston expressed, is that bad people will continue to do bad things by any means available. The gunman at Virginia Tech, which is still the deadliest school shooting in American history, did not use an AR-15 – he used two commonly owned handguns: a 9mm Glock and a .22 caliber Walter P22.

In the end, those who believe we can stop the murderous resolve of deranged individuals via gun bans or regulations should consider what Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer who gunned down 69 people at a youth summer camp in 2011, wrote in his 1,500 page manifesto on the subject of gun control:

IF they take away our AN-fertilizer, we will use AN from Ice packs! If they take away our ice packs; we will hi-jack propane trucks and use them as secondary explosive charges! If they take away our propane trucks; we will fight them with conventional weapons! If they ban the sale of weapons; we will smuggle in AK-47s from the Balkans and the Middle East!

They cannot prevent us, the European conservatives from eventually seizing political and military power. We will succeed even if we have to create our very own improvised guns.

Laws won’t stop killers from killing – but a bullet to the head will. ”

But why isn’t there more talk about institutionalizing the mentally ill? Adam Lanza’s mother needed to be home with him? What 20-year-old needs pervasive supervision from his mother? I suspect the mother, who is now dead, had very serious problems of her own. I can’t understand her keeping those 3 weapons — pictured at the link — in the home along with a 20-year-old man who — in her view — required her stay-at-home motherhood. ”

” In the coming days, journalists will have to provide clear-eyed context to help the nation come to terms with the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Without question this incident will once again spark heated debates over gun-control and school safety. Let’s step back to see what we need to know to cover those stories.

But even after the mass murder in Aurora, Colorado, and even after the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, there was no increase in support for gun restrictions. Right after that shooting, Gallup found that Americans resist gun control mostly because they do not trust the government.

Gallup said, “Almost half of Americans say they perceive the federal government to be an ‘immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens,’ and this percentage is up in recent years.”

” In using the term freedom as applied to human beings, we think only of freedom within society. Yet, today, social freedoms are considered by many people to be independent of one another. Those who call themselves “liberals” today are asking for policies which are precisely the opposite of those policies which the liberals of the 19th century advocated in their liberal programs. The so-called liberals of today have the very popular idea that freedom of speech, of thought of the press, freedom of religion, freedom from imprisonment without trial — that all these freedoms can be preserved in the absence of what is called economic freedom. They do not realize that, in a system where there is no market, where the government directs everything, all those other freedoms are illusory, even if they are made into laws and written up in constitutions.

Let us take one freedom, the freedom of the press. If the government owns all the printing presses, it will determine what is to be printed and what is not to be printed. And if the government owns all the printing presses and determines what shall or shall not be printed, then the possibility of printing any kind of opposing arguments against the ideas of the government becomes practically nonexistent. Freedom of the press disappears. And it is the same with all the other freedoms. ”

Excerpted From A Lecture He Gave In Buenos Aires In 1958 . Worth Every Minute Of Your Time .

Brian Palmer of Slate provides a very informative article on the subject . It is a must read.

” The U.S. mass murder rate does not seem to rise or fall with the availability of automatic weapons. It reached its highest level in 1929,
when fully automatic firearms were expensive and mostly limited to soldiers and organized criminals. The rate dipped in the mid-1930s,
staying relatively low before surging again in the 1970s through 1990s. Some criminologists
attribute the late-century spike to the potential for instant notoriety: Beginning with Charles Whitman’s 1966 shooting spree from atop a University of Texas tower, mass murderers became household names. Others point out that the mass murder rate fairly closely tracks the overall homicide rate. In the 2000s, for example, both the mass murder and the homicide rates dropped to their lowest levels
since the 1960s.”

“With good reason. There is a recent yet long history of false accusations in the minutes and hours after a high profile act of violence trying to link the perpetrator to the Tea Party and/or to the “right-wing,” including: